The Chalice and the Blade: Our History, Our Future

The phenomenal bestseller, with more than 500,000 copies sold worldwide, now with a new epilogue from the author--The Chalice and the Blade has inspired a generation of women and men to envision a truly egalitarian society by exploring the legacy of the peaceful, goddess-worshipping cultures from our prehistoric past.

From this premise the author hypothesizes that if we humans as a whole adopt the partnership characteristics of the ancient matriarchal societies, we will also become a peaceful, egalitarian society.

The majority of the book explores the earliest civilizations and their worship of the Goddess and then the deliberate destruction of these civilizations by power-hungry men who utilized religion to control and manipulate people. This we all know to be a fact. Those events did take place. But what most us of don't know (and are learning now) is that many aspects of the Bible were derived from the Goddess religions.

Consider the story of Adam and Eve: Eve is responsible for the downfall of man. Eve is symbolic of the Goddess, and the men who created the new religion reversed meanings of Goddess symbols to demonstrate their beliefs. For example, in Goddess religions the serpent was a regenerative life symbol but in the Christian Bible it is a symbol for Satan (Satan being representative of the Goddess). Taken in context of a patriarchal and dominator model, it is completely understandable why this particular group of men sought to destroy the Goddess religion: to obtain absolute power over all people.

In light of this information I developed a better understanding of human history and a greater compassion for all humanity. Yes much of the information in this book will be a shock to those unfamiliar with the subject material, but from learning about the tragedies and mistakes of our past we can build ourselves a better future. For this very reason I highly recommend this book and all books that seek to enlighten the human race to its greatest potential.


A Myth for Our Times   October 10, 2001
Elderbear (Loma Linda, Aztlan)
23 out of 26 found this review helpful

Riane Eisler postulates two alternatives for human society in The Chalice and the Blade. The first, and most familiar, is what she terms the "dominator model." In the dominator model, diversity requires ranking and hierarchy, giving some power over others. The more unfamiliar model, the "partnership model," does not equate diversity with either superiority or inferiority, but rather with community. "There are two critical ways of structuring the relations between the female and male halves of humanity that profoundly affect the totality of a social system." (p. 105) . She coins two terms to represent these models: 1) "Gylany," drawn from the Greek words for woman and man, she uses to describe partnership modes, and 2) "Androcracy," literally "rule by men," she frequently uses as a substitute for "patriarchy."

Her title derives from symbols for these two paradigms: the chalice, symbolizing life begetting, community and sharing; and the blade, symbolizing the power to take rather than give lifeýthis is the ultimate power to establish and enforce domination. She points out that for millennia the blade has been a masculine symbol, this is not the problem.

"The root of the problem lies in a social system in which the power of the Blade is idealizedýin which both men and women are taught to equate true masculinity with violence and dominance and to see men who do not conform to this ideal as 'too soft' or 'effeminate.'" (p. xviii)

She further points out that the directions of partnership cultures and dominator cultures will be quite different. Partnership cultures emphasize technologies to sustain and enhance life while dominator cultures develop technology to destroy and dominate. Consider our own culture, where schools resort to nearly every fund-raising dodge imaginable, even relying on the proceeds of gambling, while the military/industrial complex consumes the lion's share of our resources. The average teacher in California makes less than a wet-behind-the-ears college graduate who goes to work programming computers for a defense contractor! What would it be like if schools got all the money they needed and the Army had to hold bake sales to buy new hardware?

This book is an origin myth. It attempts to explain where we came from, how we evolved from an age of partnership to an age of domination. It also explores how we might begin to reverse the process. Numerous scholars have challenged Eisler's ideas and her use of archaeological evidence. I have noticed her sifting through Hebrew history and using only those aspects which support her theories, while ignoring important writings and events which tend to support a partnership paradigm while she is exposing the dominator model. Regardless of how well the evidence fits the history she lays out, this is a masterful piece of social deconstruction. Whether a golden partnership age existed or not, we do not live in one now, and we never will unless we learn to live differently together.

Eisler starts her chronicle with old Europe. She spends three chapters exploring the stone age, neolithic art, Goddess worship, and the equalitarian nature of partnership culture evinced through archaeological exploration Crete and the work of Marija Gimbutas. Then she begins to describe the Indo/Aryan/Kurgan invasions of Europe. She examines the role of metallurgy and male supremacy. She notes growing evidence of warfare, human sacrifice, and slavery.

She decries the truncation of civilization as partnership gives way to male domination of societies. She shows how memories of the partnership age lingered on in myths and religious practices for thousands of years until myths morphed, giving solar/warrior Gods supremacy over fertility/mother Goddesses. Women and sexuality were marginalized, securing the male domination of culture. She traces the effects of patriarchy through classic culture and the Christian mythos into the very heart of our modern civilization.

Although she does a masterful job of tracing the history of the problem, she offers little in this book for solving the problem. She spends 180 pages telling us how and where we went wrong, only to offer a paltry 18 pages generalizing about what we need to do now. I found this disappointing, but there's only so much that can be crammed into the pages of a single book. Her book, The Partnership Way, acts as a guide through this book for a group wishing to work within the partnership paradigm.

The Chalice and the Blade presents a powerful deconstruction of our society. It offers an "origins myth" to us and gives us a prophetic challenge to live differently. Although her use of scholarship has been attacked, this book is still worth reading. You don't have to run out and buy an Apple ý Computer to "think different," you can read this book! A solid five stars.

(If you'd like to discuss this book or review in more depth, click on the "about me" link above and drop me an email. Thanks!)


It's rare to be challenged this much by a book...   November 27, 2001
Nigel Thomas (SF, CA, US)
23 out of 28 found this review helpful

...and I have a deeper appreciation for a book that can. I honestly did not know what I was getting myself into when I picked this book up. As a male it was a difficult book to get through and I went into in a very open-minded "space" in my life. Thankfully, I made it through.

To illustrate, I handed this book to a catholic, insisting that she read it, who ended up not being able to finish it and giving it back to me. What did I expect? The book is honest (brutally honest) in terms of the observations it makes on what the last 5000 years of male-dominated society.

To compare, Eisler draws on the anthropology and scholarship of people like Gimburtas and Merlin Stone. To illustrate what a female-lead society could look like. It's not just a different form of domination, it's a paradigm shift. This book changed my viewpoint on many things including my sense of history, my views of relations between the sexes. But the most valuable thing I came away with was hope for tomorrow that wasn't over-shadowed by weapons of mass destruction of looming with visions of a planet that has been polluted and stripped of it's resources.


A Useful Revisionist Exercise   March 27, 2001
Robert L. Rose (Blooming Glen, PA, 18911-0064, Bucks County,United States))
26 out of 32 found this review helpful

Riane Eisler marshalls compelling evidence from many disciplines to assert that the struggle between a "gylanic" social structure based on male-female partnership exemplified in ancient Crete and Turkey, and a male dominated "androcracy", has been the major unseen force shaping western history and is once again in our time coming to a head."

Eisler writes that the "root of the problem lies in a social system in which the power of the blade is idealized." In contrast to this male-oriented power, Eisler describes the power of the chalice, "the power to transform death into life through the mysterious cyclical regeneration of nature." Her book poses a radical revisioning of the past which pushes the advent of civilization further back into the Neolithic era to include cultures which practiced a "gylanic" form of society. Regarding biblical history and morality, Eisler notes that "to the extent that it reflects a [male] dominator society, it is at best stunted."

Continuing with biblical history as she advances her analysis forward to the present day, Eisler writes that "the more gylanic followers of Jesus tried to transform the cross on which he was executed into a symbol of rebirth- a symbol associated with a social movement that set out to preach and practice human equality and such "feminine concepts as gentleness, compassion and peace." Eisler also details the attempt by some Gnostic Christians to establish a continuum of psycho-sexual identity in the face of opposition from church patriarchs as another instance of the gylanic retreating in the face of androcratic political power. I found this revisionist adventure to be very useful, and I recommend it to those seeking the reintegration of a culture mesmerized by scientism, materialism, and the faux enlightenment of prosperity.